Hope everyone had a jolly holiday. In this week’s rejecting rejection, author Cory Putman Oakes tells us about her many rejections before finally getting to a point where she wanted to be. Cory Putman Oakes has a book coming out in February 2015. “Getting a book published is tough.” -Oakes.
Rationalizing Rejection
By Cory Putman Oakes
The decision to become a writer is a beautifully irrational thing.
Consider the following career specifics, as they might appear on a “fact” sheet in a high school guidance office, under the heading CAREER: WRITER
- Starting salary: none
- Earning Potential: technically unlimited, but generally speaking, you are unlikely to ever make enough money to actually support yourself
- Hours: around the clock
- Company Health Plan: none
- Retirement Plan: none
- Office Space: probably your kitchen table/couch/local Starbucks
- Work Evaluations: will be public, merciless, and open to anyone who feels like giving their opinion
- Career Advancement Opportunities: uncertain
- Misc: this career is almost entirely solitary, generally misunderstood by the world at large, and there is an alarming correlation of both mental illness and/or substance abuse in those who choose to take it on.
- But you’ll get to write stuff!
Writers are people for whom that last sentence cancels out everything else that comes before it.
We know that we are choosing a career where we are unlikely to get rich (or even solvent). Where success means exposing oneself (or at least, one’s work) to public scrutiny. Where everybody you meet at cocktail parties will simultaneously romanticize and trivialize what you do. No one can tell you how a writing career path will go – there are no certainties.
Except for rejection. You will almost certainly face rejection at every turn.
Getting a book published is tough. Just look at this CHART, which details all the various stars that must align, in order, for a book to be acquired by a publisher. This chart alone should be enough to convince a rational person to run screaming from this profession.
So why don’t we?
Seriously, why don’t we?
Part of the answer is that most of us sincerely love to write. We love it, and we’ll put up with a surprising amount of nonsense in order to keep on doing it. But let’s be honest; if that was all it was, a pure, unadulterated love of writing, then none of us would bother with the “business” side of writing at all. We could just sit happily in a room by ourselves, writing away. We’d never worry about rejection because no one else would ever see our work, let alone evaluate it.
But most of us don’t do that. Instead, we put our work out there. We risk rejection. We feel its sting, its wallop, its knock-out punch. Then we stand up again and ask for more.
Why? 
The only answer I can come up with is that on some level, we think we have something to say that somebody else might appreciate. We want to be heard. We dream of connecting. And we hope that we can beat the odds. That one day, there will be a book in a bookstore that has our name on it. And maybe people will even like it.
Above all else, writers are believers. We believe, sometimes in spite of overwhelming evidence to the contrary, that we have something to contribute. We believe in our work. Our chances of success. Ourselves. Quite irrationally.
It takes a certain special something to look into the face of a beast like publishing and say heck yeah, sign me up! Some might call it chutzpah. Ego. Insanity. Masochism. My preferred term is “pathological optimism.”
Whatever you choose to call it, this insane disregard of the odds usually coexists with an equally strong, crippling sense of self-doubt. A doubt that grows stronger with each rejection and is in constant battle with our belief in ourselves. We are big dreamers, but we are also very, very concerned that we won’t be able to hack it.
And it’s this beautiful combination of neurosis that gets our butts in our chairs, day after day. It’s what keeps us moving forward.
So let’s celebrate our rejections. Rejection is, after all, the most rational part of a writer’s life. It is the only certainty we have in a world of dreams. It is the thing that keeps us tethered to reality. It’s the one thing I guarantee will occur, should you choose to take on this strange, wonderful career path.
Let’s embrace rejection as an unlikely ally. Let’s celebrate it as a right of passage. Let’s laugh in its face and feed it cookies. Let’s do all of these things because rejection means you have dared to put your work out there. You have taken on a career that sounds ridiculous on paper and dared to believe that you can make it work. You have stood up and declared that what you have to say matters. And those things are step #1 of any definition of “writing success.”
I’m also beginning to suspect that they might be steps #4, #7, #15, #22, #85, and #92.
But that’s what’s so beautifully irrational about the whole thing . . .
Special thanks to Madeline Smoot for allowing me to use her very scary chart.
http://www.madelinesmoot.com/acquisitions-process/
Cory Putman Oakes is a children’s book author from Austin, Texas. Her debut middle grade, DINOSAUR BOY, comes out February, 2015, from Sourcebooks. Cory is also the author of THE VEIL, a young adult novel. She spent many years collecting rejections for her writing and she stores them all, fondly, in a special file in the back of her closet.